Before the Affiliate Summit West I was barely using Twitter. Off course at the time I knew there were lots of people making a decent amount of money with it, but I also knew you have to have A LOT of followers to make some serious money and I didn’t have any at that time. But some of the sessions on the ASW about social media did get me interested in the phenomenon everybody’s raving about.

At one session they started talking about ‘hashtags’ and I looked at my friend (who is a Twitter addict) with a big frown upon my face and asked him what the …. these things were. He then explained the functionality of those thingies with the weird name. So for everybody that still doesn’t know what they do, don’t feel stupid like I did, but they’re used to categorize your post. For instance you put #marketing (where # is the hashtag) in a post. Later people can search on that hashtag and they will see all messages that have been written by other Twitterers using the same hashtag. Pretty neat.

At the ASW I did some tweets about the sessions and put the #ASW10 hashtag at the end of my message. And surely enough, soon the followers started pouring in. All super targeted visitors because they were all either at the Affiliate Summit or at least interested in internet marketing. So using general hashtags to get targeted followers is a pretty neat option.

After I tweeted about #marketing, #affiliate marketing, #internet marketing and so on I was gaining a few hundred followers. Nothing to get excited about yet. My next option was to try just following other people who are in the same business. I gathered a list somewhere on the net of all the internet marketeers that were using Twitter and I just followed them all. And that’s when things got serious… Within days I got over a thousand followers. Although that was fun, I saw that at that point I was following (and still am) more people than were following me. And that’s kind of a bummer because you want to have the followers/following ratio as high as possible. Also I used to actually read the tweets from the persons I was following. Now it’s just impossible to keep track of.

Then I decided to join Socialoomph.com. This website provides all kind of services, but as far as Twitter goes it lets you set automatic thankyou messages for new followers, schedule tweets, automatically follow people who follow you, unfollow people who unfollow you and a whole lot of other things. It also features banner auctions were you can bid on having your Twitter profile posted on their homepage for a day. I entered one auction and I bid $10 and won it so my profile was on their homepage for a day. I don’t have any idea how many followers I got from that, I only know I got 22 visitors to this blog from it through the link in my Twitter profile.

The latest thing I tried was Sponsored Tweets. It’s a neat system that lets you buy a sponsored tweet from a GREAT number of Twitterers, OR, if you have enough followers, lets YOU place a sponsored tweet and earn cash from it.

I decided to have 3 topdogs in the internet marketing business place a sponsored tweet for me. Shoemoney, John Chow and Jonathan Volk. I got some pretty interesting results back from it. Of course, the main goal was to get more followers, but it’s impossible to track how many you get from each but I wanted both followers and visitors to my blog so either action was fine.

Here you can see what the results were for this blog:

I won’t specify the prices I paid for it, but where I paid 100% for Shoemoney (92k followers), I paid 33% for John Chow (50k followers) and 11% for Jonathan Volk (17k followers).

Obviously Shoemoney delivered the most clicks with that much followers, but his traffic was least interested in this blog. They had the least amount of pageviews, least time on the blog and the highest bounce rate. Then came a surprise. Jonathan with ‘only’ 17k followers comes in and sends me 126 visitors with a high average time on site and a very acceptable bouncerate. John Chow delivered the least clicks but then again he is very active on Twitter so your sponsored tweet quickly becomes old. But his traffic liked my site best of all.

So, there are definitely some good opportunities in sponsored tweets, but you’ll have to try the different Twitterers out before you know anything, and my god, there are a LOT.

My next goal is to get some more followers too and do some sponsored tweets on my own. If you are not following me already, you’re missing out!!! You can follow me here!

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